


Knitted With Care

by Assumare



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Dream Bubbles, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pale-Black Vacillation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-05 10:18:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3116450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assumare/pseuds/Assumare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat Vantas really just wanted to spend the morning alone in his respiteblock, but his plans change when he finds himself swamped in sweaters, in the presence of Dave Strider, and dragged into a dreambubble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knitted With Care

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bruhstrider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bruhstrider/gifts).



> This somehow ended up with a pretty angsty Karkat, but rest assured, Dave is a pretty angsty teen too, he just hides it better.

It’s _freezing_.

Well, it’s chilly. It’s chilly enough for even you to feel it, and you know your skin is thicker than a human’s, so who knows how he’s feeling.

It’s maybe mid morning; you should have been getting ready for bed but everyone’s sleeping schedule on this blasted rock is fucked since day and night mean nothing anymore. Still, you wish you were at least in your respiteblock right now. Someone is probably sleeping, or at least they were until you started your one-sided daily yelling competition with a goddamn smug pile of bricks and shades slapped on them to maximize douchebagginess.

****It’s cold, it’s midmorning, and you are fucking _swamped_ in knitted goods, and you aren’t going to sit there and fondle your shameglobes until forgiveness pops out.

_“Dave Strider, I swear to every deity that your monkey species has ever so much as thought about that if you decaptualogue one more knitted cozy onto this rock from hell, I will personally fucking shove it down your windtube until it emerges out your-”_ And you’re cut off as thick, knitted cloth smothers your face and successfully ends your sentence for you. Again.

You flail and splutter like an idiot trying to get the thing off of you and simultaneously striking out at the boy who just flung this at you seconds before but you know he’s already flashstepped away and is probably sniggering while taking pictures with his iShades.

You are Karkat Vantas, and you are not a happy passenger on the SS Stupidity.

“Dude, you should totally see yourself right now, you’re like some kind of raving whirlwind here to seek revenge against the pointlessness of nice sweaters. Haha, oh man, the Mayor will love this, say, ‘I am the ghost of bad-fashion-choices’ past.’ Ouch, dude, it’s not nice to hit people, we’ve talked about this.”

He’s silent and distracted as you pull what you now realize to be several tangled sweaters off of you, no doubt posting the pictures and possible video he just took online with his stupid shades.

“Pointlessness isn’t even a word, asslump. Now are you done throwing knitted junk at me so I can finally go back to my block in peace, or have you decided that dragging me out of my block so late in the morning to cover me in crafted crap isn’t enough torture?”

“Hey, you can’t blame me for ‘dragging you out,’ you followed me all on your own. And daytime versus nighttime means shit out here, it’s kind of a shabby excuse at this point, bro.”

“I followed you because I wanted to know why the fuck you appeared in my personal block to throw cloth shit in my face and then leave!”

“Because dude, don’t question the sweaters.”

“ _You already said that, that doesn’t answer any fucking questions!_ Plus, these aren’t even all sweaters! This is some kind of small snuggleplane, and this is a goddamn scarf! Is doing random shit getting you off now, or is there actually a reason behind your unjustified insanity? Have you finally gone space crazy?!”

“Sure dude, I have some answers, but are they the ones you really want or are looking for?”

You snarl and open your squawk gaper wide to shout some more, but he interrupts you.

“Okay, okay, ‘s not really fair for me to withhold information from my bro.”

You grumble something about being called his “bro” when you’re so clearly not, but he ignores you and puts an arm around your shoulder, dropping his voice level to tell you this “classified” information.

“All right, so Rose has been making sweaters like crazy, right? So now we got all these sweaters and random knit projects, you know? So what I’m doing for Rose is being all Santa in this bitch and giving them to people, ‘cause I’m so generous, you know? Like it’s a goddamn crime to not own some sweet warm clothes loot to keep you warm, especially on this cold-ass rock, and it’s a straight up _tragedy_ to not own an ugly sweater or five. So Rose made some okay stuff and then some straight up _bombin’_ ugly sweaters for us. Yeah, I just couldn’t watch the poor troll youth continue on any longer without the necessities. I just gotta give and fuckin’ give.”

“Dave, shut you word hole, _please_. It’s festering nonsense and clouding my ability to not shove my foot up your wasteshoot, where it _belongs_.”

“Ooh, kinky.” Dave wiggles his eyebrows in an eerily similar way to Rose.

You punch him (albeit lightly) in the shoulder. “You disgusting nooklick, I swear to god that-”

You’re forced to choke on your words as a weird feeling hits your stomach like you’re falling and you grab on to Dave’s arm so you won’t be as alone as last time. Hopefully you’ll just be able to find the meteor again and hide in your room, but you’re not optimistic.

“Ow, fuck dude, you’ve got a mean grip with those claws attached.” You let go and look around to see where you’ve been taken. Dave doesn’t seem bothered that you dragged him with you, and that pisses you off a little.

You’ve landed in what looks like your hive, which could mean a very good thing or a very bad thing. You recall the time you snuck out without your lusus’s permission because you thought you could handle the city alone, and travelled all the way to the nearest gathering, which was a sizeable distance. Predictably, it had ended badly, with you getting punched in the face for being an arrogant asshole and small amounts of blood dripping from your sniffnode. You managed to escape most of the trolls that were around, but some that you thought you had evaded followed you home. Luckily, they didn’t alert your neighbors (who were still a fair distance away, but neighbors nonetheless) to your mutation, but unluckily, you had to sit out their banging and yelling and window-breaking until they left.

You remember when one of them broke the right set of windows and actually managed to get into your house. She taunted you and said she was going to make you watch her kill your shitblooded lusus die first, then detailed how she would cut you open and watch you bleed out the stain on the Empress's empire. You had never been so terrified, but you had been trained well by your lusus, and so when she wrapped her big, burly arms around your lusus, you reacted automatically and shot a sickle at her, which lodged itself in her shoulder. You had weaponized your sylladex almost accidentally when you were cleaning your room earlier and picked up your different sickles that you had acquired in past sweeps, and this was before you somehow switched to that impossibly stupid Encryption modus, so after your initial shock with actually hitting her wore off, you flung a few more at her until she left, howling in pain and apparently finding that giving the “shitblood” what he deserved wasn’t worth it. The others left soon after and it hadn’t taken much to clean up the mess, but that moment you truly realized what your mutation meant for you, and you would hardly leave your hive again.

Your stomach churns in remembrance and sinks as a bad feeling settles within you.

“Dave, we need to get out of here.”

“This is like your house, isn’t it? You just don’t want me to see what weird shit you have.” He opens a door and walks through it before you can do anything, and you’re forced to try and stop him.

You really, really don’t want to relive that moment, ever.

“Strider, fuck dammit, listen to me.” He goes through another door and you hurry to catch up with him, afraid he’s going to find the right door and walk right into that mess.

You panic when you realize that’s exactly what he’s about to do when he hands reach for the next doorknob.

“ _Strider, you fuckwit, stop!_ ” You outright snarl, not being able to contain yourself, and grab the back of his shirt before slamming him against the wall and standing almost chest to chest with him.

His eyes are hidden by monstrous stupidity that covers his face, but you can tell he’s surprised and maybe even a little angry. You’ve lurched so suddenly into pitch territory that you’re at a loss for what you were even doing, but you almost can’t even seem to care as your growling continues.

Almost, until you hear a responding snarl on the other side of the door Dave was about to open.

You stop, and the both of you whip your heads to look at the door in surprise, and then back at each other. You hate that you’re showing fear on your face, and you hate that you just went from pitch to whatever again like always, but you have more important things to worry about.

Dreambubbles can’t recreate living things that were never part of the game, but they can do realistic projections of livings things from memories. This is a terrifying aspect to the bubbles, and you fucking hate it, especially when shit like this happens that could actually threaten your life. That would be a really stupid way to die, but you can’t say it wouldn’t be a fitting way to end your pointless existence, so you can’t say it’s impossible. Still, they’re just projections, and they could be imagined out of existence if you concentrated enough probably, but it’s difficult to do that when there’s someone snarling for your blood just a door’s width away from you and Dave all up in your personal space.

You release the front of Dave’s shirt, which you hadn’t realized was bunched up in your fist, and try to calm your panicking for a second. This isn’t real. Well it is, but not really. If you try and think a little clearly, maybe you can get out of this mess without dying. That would be nice.

“Dave. This is memory. That thing outside that door? A troll that wants to kill me for my shit blood. And she’ll succeed too, if we don’t get out of here. Okay? We need to fucking leave, are you getting it now?”

Dave nods almost a little too understandingly (god dammit, you’re getting emotional whiplash from this idiot) and straightens to move, but the two of you jump when the troll thumps against the door to break it down. Your hive may be built pretty well, but the doors won’t be able to sustain much pounding for a fucking massive troll like her.

You and Dave manage to bolt through the other door, but somehow (probably dreambubble mechanics, _fuck_ ) she manages to keep the door from closing, and she’s muttering all the pathetic things you know to be true about yourself and your mutation, and you’re crying, and you’re yelling at Dave to push on the door harder when she gets an arm around the door to scratch at you, and then you’re-

And then you’re suddenly falling, the pressure you were putting on the door suddenly having no place to go except for sending you to the ground.

“What- oof.” Dave is thrown off-balance by the sudden shift as well, and lands on top of you.

In your panic (and crying, and yelling, and overall embarrassing last moments before what you were sure was your death, again) you didn’t notice the twist in your gut that tells you when a bubble is changing.

“Wow, shit. Sorry, let me just-” Dave moves off of you and it feels nice to breathe again.

Your bloodpusher is pumping fast. You feel like crying more.

Fuck.

“Wow, that was. That was really fucked up.”

“Can it, Strider.” You push yourself up and turn away from him, growling again to cover up your fucking embarrassing unbrutality. Fuck, you are _such_ a wiggler.

You don’t recognize this place very well, but you’re sure it had something to do with the game. Maybe it’s the hive of one of your lame troll counterparts? But something about it seems alien to you.

“Rose’s fancy-ass mansion. Man, she had it really nice. Look at this shit.” He walks over to look at pictures of a wriggler Rose on the mantlepiece (you’d be pretty foolish to think he wasn’t otherwise taking photos with his iShades of the whole thing), and you turn away to look at the books on a couple of tall bookshelves. There’s a fire roaring, and you wish you could appreciate it, but you’re still chilly somehow.

You feel like shit.

You can’t see any of the titles on the book spines, your disgusting, tinted tears are blurring your sight too much and you’re trying horribly to hold it in until you’re safe in your respiteblock, alone. That was the shittiest experience you’ve had in a long time, and you thought that you were getting better about not hating on yourself 100% of the time, but now that’s fucked and you feel like you’ve returned to square one again. This time you don’t have a moirail or even a close friend like Kanaya to help you, now that everyone’s occupied because you turned them all away. _Fuck_. It was a mistake bringing _him_ of all people with you.

“Dude.” Dave’s close behind you, and you stiffen at the sound of his voice; you hadn’t heard him move. “You’re shivering. If you’re that cold you can sit by the fire.”

“Fuck _off_ , Strider. Jesus, if you could just-” Your voice catches, embarrassing the shit out of you further. Your body just really tries to fuck with you as much as possible, huh?

“Hey, are you okay? You’re not being all shouty.” He tries to touch your shoulder and you shrug him off, wiping at your eyes. “Are you- Are you crying? What’s wrong? I don’t really know how to handle this, uh, do you want me to get Rose or something, I can-”

You turn and push at him, hard, because you’re an asshole, but he grabs at you before you can stomp away and hide somewhere until the bubble passes.

You stop, slow down. You can’t see his face. It makes you want to hit him.

You stare at each other for a moment. You feel exposed, embarrassed. You glare. He raises his glasses and puts them on his head, slowly, like he’s trying not to spook you. That makes you want to punch him too, but less so when his red eyes are staring straight into yours. You can see pity on his face and it makes your gut twist a little. Not like the bubble is changing again,  but more like the way that look is so ignorant, unknowing of what that look even means to you, and so not romantic, so... grossly platonic.

Him looking vulnerable like that makes you want to punch him as well. And yourself, for good measure.

Instead, you stare. Just... stare. A few moments pass, and you realize that he’s not just pitying you, he’s also telling you, in the only way he can that he gets it, he _understands_.

“Hey,” He finally says, softly. “I know I’m a tool, but I’m not entirely heartless. I give a shit about you, okay? We’re bros, and bros don’t let other bros go freak out by themselves, or something cheesy like that.”

“You’re an asshole.” You mumble into his sweater as you let him pull you into a hug.

You stand there, like that, sniffling and hugging him for a long time until you’re calm again, and you realize you’re still shivering about the same time that he does.

“Shit, are you really that cold? I’m from _Texas_ , this makes no sense at all.” He starts going off on a tangent quietly to himself like he usually does and you tune it out, but follow his lead when he lightly pushes you closer to the fire and sits down.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be that much heat coming from the thing. Dave realizes this, too.

“Okay, that’s it. I’m afraid we have no other choice, doctor. We have to use our last resort, or Tiny Tim won’t be able to walk this Christmas and say that inspirational phrase that raises hope in millions. It’s okay, Tiny Tim. We got this; this year you’ll be able to have your cake and actually eat it, too.”

“What are you t-talking about?” You shiver harshly and your teeth begin to chatter quietly too, keeping you from saying much else without sounding weird.

“Sweater time.” Two sweaters pop out of midair and onto the floor, a plain burgundy one and a plain blue one. You hastily reach for the blue one when his hand lightly bats yours away.

“Bro, no. You can’t wear it like this. We went over this already: a plain sweater is an abomination. I had some other ones that were better, but I guess I left them all out in the hall on the meteor...” He trails off and you hope he won’t notice you impatiently reaching for one again, but he does and repeats the action again. “Dude, just wait, won’t you? We gotta pimp these knitted goods _out_. Here.” He gets you the blanket off of Rose’s couch and drapes it on you, before sitting down again and ejecting a bunch of random crap from his sylladex.

“What’s all this shit? Are you a hoarder, Strider?” You pick up a toy earth-vehicle and you wonder who it used to belong to before Dave found it.

“No! I just knew these sweaters were just sitting in my sylladex and waiting for the right time to sprinkle some bitchin creativity on them. I’ve been saving stuff for that as I come across it.” He sounds suspiciously defensive, but you decide to hound him on it later.

“Fine, you fucker, I’ll amuse you, even though it would be just my luck to freeze to death in a dreambubble because I was catering to your messed up needs.”

“Shit yeah, let’s be Santa!”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Almost an hour later you lazily lean against Dave in an attempt to steal his body heat while putting the finishing touches on your trashy sweater. It doesn’t look very good, but next to Strider’s, who of course put effort into making it as shitty as possible, it looks like a masterpiece.

There’s yarn, garland, small plastic figurines, human Christmas ornaments, popcorn, random metal bits, and more, and although it looks trashy, it’s also kind of... silly. You can’t remember having this good of a time in a long while. Dave could actually be funny and entertaining when he wanted to be, so there was that, plus it was relaxing and definitely took your mind off the last bubble.

“All right, I’m done with my piece of art. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. What do you think?” He nudges you and takes his right hand off of your head from where he was stroking your hair and you look at it. Yours has a bit of a pattern, even with all the odds and ends, but his is just a straight up flashy mess with shit all over it.

“It looks like a piece of shit.” You deadpan, struggling not to laugh or smile even though he can’t see you at this angle anyways.

“Perfect.” He picks his up carefully, but the glue is dry on both of yours thanks to dreambubble magic. “Put it on. It’s not art until you wear it.”

“Who says?” You laugh, watching him struggle with pulling his own on, but you help him by pulling down the ends for him and then you slip yours on, too.

Maybe it’s just dreambubble nonsense, but you feel warmer already.

“Hey, yours doesn’t look half bad. Oh, but you missed something.” He puts his finger on your chest, seemingly pointing at something, and you look, but he drags his finger up your face suddenly and you startle, nearly biting him out of instinctual reaction. “Made you look.”

“You _ass_!” You shove him but laugh anyways, because it was so stupid and childish of him. He laughs at you too and says something about how you should’ve seen your face, and then he puts his arm around your shoulder and starts to walk you somewhere (you don’t care where; you trust his judgement at least somewhat). A warm feeling settles in your stomach. You _are_ happy.

“I hate to bring an end to our slumberparty but I think the meteor is pretty close and we should probably head back. Damn, is that what people do at slumberparties? I don’t even know, I should google this shit... We should totally have ironic slumberparties sometime and paint our nails and do hair and talk shit about everyone.”

“Why don’t we just go to my block and watch some movies? That’s ironic or something, right? Shit, if you really want a slumberparty or whatever that bad, you can sleep in my block tonight.”

You look at him and he nods thoughtfully. While you were talking you had walked back onto the meteor again, and the tinny noise of your feet hitting the metal floor echos just the slightest bit.

“Yeah, that sounds sweet. We can do the full works with the hair and nails and talking shit some other time. And hey, maybe I can even show you some actual earth masterpieces instead of the slop you’ve been watching.”

“Hey, you shithead, 27 Dresses _was_ a masterpiece! And you could use a lesson in Alternian cinema too, douchebag.”

Black flairs up inside you again, but you still feel warm deep down.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. It’ll be great though, I won’t even bag on your movies that much and I’ll try to only talk for like, half the time. Deal?”

You look down at your matching sweater schemes. Wearing clothes that are keeping you warm and that you decorated together is oddly pale and renews the warm feeling double.

“Yeah, sure. Let’s get this disaster on the ground-travel intersections. Or, excuse me, ‘ironic’ disaster.”

“Damn straight.” He pushes you softly, and you can’t help but laugh again.

For 12th Perigree’s Eve this year you just wanted one thing, and you had thought that it would be impossible: you wished for a friend. Just someone who would listen and support you, and someone to spend all this shitty time on the meteor with so maybe you wouldn’t feel so alone. But you were so focused on your sour relationships that you didn’t open your eyes to consider someone who had been right there for you probably for a while now.

He may be a complete dickface, and he may be giving you emotional whiplash between pitch and pale, but despite all that, you’re thankful that of all people, at least he’s your human bro.


End file.
